Armies of telepathically controlled rats come step closer

Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Boston University recently reported a technique that links the minds of human volunteers and rat subjects, letting the humans make the rat tails move just by thinking about it.

The "non-invasive computer-to-brain interface" used "transcranial focused ultrasound" to stimulate the tail-controlling section of a rat's brain - no surgically implanted electrodes required. Six volunteers were able to get the tail of one of six rats with which they had been paired to move, basically by thinking about getting the tail to move; the electrical impulses from their thoughts were picked up by the interface, which then signaled the system to direct the ultrasound to the rat's brain.

Now, all the rats were anesthetized, but the researchers said there's no reason the control couldn't go the other way - and, with development of some more systems, be extended to more complicated biological systems:

[U]sing only surface scalp EEG electrodes, it is now possible to use neural signals related to limb kinematics for the control of complicated and analogous machine motion. The adoption of such techniques will permit the detection of more diverse intentions of the operator, and subsequently will allow the operation of [computer-brain interface] aimed at modulating different (rodent) brain areas. For example, the imagery of each hand movement, as detected by multiple EEG montages or real-time fMRI, can be used to sonicate each of the corresponding hemispheric forepaw motor areas of the rat’s brain, resulting in mirror-like limb-to-limb control of the rodent forepaw motion.